Related papers: On the First Generation of Stars
There is a longstanding discussion about whether low mass stars can form from pristine gas in the early Universe. A particular point of interest is whether we can find surviving pristine stars from the first generation in our local…
The nucleosynthesis in the first massive stars may be constrained by observing the surface composition of long-lived very iron-poor stars born around 10 billion years ago from material enriched by their ejecta. Many interesting clues on…
We investigate the formation of the first stars at the end of the cosmic dark ages with a suite of three-dimensional, moving mesh simulations that directly resolve the collapse of the gas beyond the formation of the first protostar at the…
The formation of the first stars and the subsequent population of X-ray binaries represents a fundamental transition in the state of the Universe as it evolves from near homogeneity to being abundant in collapsed structures such as…
We simulate the formation of a low metallicity (0.01 Zsun) stellar cluster in a dwarf galaxy at redshift z~14. Beginning with cosmological initial conditions, the simulation utilizes adaptive mesh refinement and sink particles to follow the…
Despite their ubiquity, there are many open questions regarding galactic and cosmic magnetic fields. Specifically, current observational constraints cannot rule out if magnetic fields observed in galaxies were generated in the Early…
The envelopes and disks that surround protostars reflect the initial conditions of star and planet formation and govern the assembly of stellar masses. Characterizing these structures requires observations that span the near-infrared to…
Star formation remains an unsolved problem in astrophysics. Numerical studies of large-scale structure simulations cannot resolve the whole process and their approach usually assumes that only gas denser than a typical threshold can host…
Stars and their corresponding protoplanetary disks form in diverse environments. To account for these natural variations, we investigate the formation process around nine solar mass stars with a maximum resolution of 2 AU in a Giant…
Young neutron stars (NSs) have magnetic fields $B$ in the range $10^{12}-10^{15}$ G, believed to be generated by dynamo action at birth. We argue that such a dynamo is actually too inefficient to explain the strongest of these fields.…
Large telescopes have allowed astronomers to observe galaxies that formed as early as 850 million years after the Big Bang. We predict when the first star that astronomers can observe formed in the universe, accounting for the first time…
We review our current understanding of how the first galaxies formed at the end of the cosmic dark ages, a few 100 million years after the Big Bang. Modern large telescopes discovered galaxies at redshifts greater than seven, whereas…
We investigate the formation of metal-free, Population III (Pop III), stars within a minihalo at z ~ 20 with a smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) simulation, starting from cosmological initial conditions. Employing a hierarchical,…
In order to address the generation of neutron star magnetic fields, with particular focus on the dichotomy between magnetars and radio pulsars, we consider the properties of dynamos as inferred from other astrophysical systems. With…
The elegance of inflationary cosmology and cosmological perturbation theory ends with the formation of the first stars and galaxies, the initial sources of light that launched the phenomenologically rich process of cosmic reionization. Here…
Understanding the star formation process is central to much of modern astrophysics. For several decades it has been thought that stellar birth is primarily controlled by the interplay between gravity and magnetostatic support, modulated by…
Magnetic fields are found in many astrophysical objects, ranging from galaxy clusters to the interstellar medium of galaxies and neutron stars. Strong magnetic fields are also observed in massive stars, but it is still unclear how they are…
The distribution of stellar masses that form in one star-formation event in a given volume of space is called the initial mass function (IMF). The IMF has been estimated from low-mass brown dwarfs to very massive stars. Combining IMF…
To constrain the nature of the very first stars, we investigate the collapse and fragmentation of primordial, metal-free gas clouds. We explore the physics of primordial star formation by means of three-dimensional simulations of the dark…
Magnetorotational instability (MRI) has been suggested to lead a rapid growth of the magnetic field in core collapse supernovae and produce departures from spherical syymmetry that can be important in determining the explosion mechanism. We…